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The Lower : stair towers, pivoting escalators and moving walkways, a rally area, temporary From Fun Palace to Creative Prison modules and kiosks, no entrance, open access on the ground floor, and a com- plex system of “environmental controls generating charged static-vapour zones, ANTHONY ILES optical barriers, warm-air curtains and fog dispersal”.3 Price was obsessed with containerisation. As an integral part of the Fun The , formed by strips of common land, canals and marshes Palace design, gantry cranes would move building modules around the site. separating the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney from the Victorian suburbs Reyner Banham had celebrated the aesthetics of containerisation in his article of Newham, and , was an agricultural then industrial area “Flatscape with Containers”, suggesting that the modular aesthetic of the con- characterised by railways, greenhouses, warehouses and light manufacturing tainer challenged architecture to develop an anti-monumentality in line with until the end of the Second World War. This zone, shaped by the successive the new conditions that the age of mobility and indeterminacy brought with waves of redevelopment that have assailed its wild, industrial and playful nature, it.4 Price’s architecture was thought of at the time as pragmatic and anti-sym- has over the last five years become the largest building site in . bolic, yet even the “cultural” use of industrial materials can be seen to have its Regeneration, a buzz word of the Blair era, is contemporary parlance for own symbolism, as well as a practical application, particular to his de-industri- the violent forms of destruction and displacement which have accompanied alising times. capitalist development throughout industrialisation, but now appear loosed A promotional pamphlet for the Fun Palace promised activities such as: from the production of competitive advantage for the growth of capital. “Kunst Dabbling, Genius Chat, Clownery, Fireworks, Rallies, Battles of flow- Instead, these “industries” now grow on their own, producing competing world ers, Concerts, Science Gadgetry, Juke Box Information, Learning Machines”. cities entirely at the behest of the tourism, entertainment, financial, insurance There were to be big screens with live feeds from a number of sites around the and real estate economies. The London 2012 Olympics promises to transform city, such as hospitals, police stations and football matches. not only the specific zone of the Lower Lea Valley, but also the whole of east Also indicating an interest in user-generated content, Keith Khan, shortly London to suit the interests of these so-called industries. after his appointment as head of the Cultural Olympiad in 2007, said he was In 1964 the architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood “keen to embrace the ‘iPod generation’ with the use of digital technology and made plans for a “Fun Palace” to be sited in the Lower Lea Valley in the concepts used by websites such as MySpace and YouTube”.5 The “open” status zone between Stratford and , close to the site of the 2012 London of art and creativity has been internalised by administrators of culture to such Olympics. The Fun Palace was to be the culmination of the socialist theatre a degree that there is almost no content whatsoever; everything is contingency, director’s dream for a flexible theatrical space open to all and shaped by its users’ vague statements and buzzwords appropriate to open-ended projects sustained interests, a space where “the latest discoveries of engineering and science can by hot air: provide an environment for pleasure and discovery, a place to look at the stars, to eat, stroll, meet and play”.1 But this is all process, structure and construct. The philosophy of cul- In the London of the early 1960s Littlewood’s popular agit-prop thea- ture and creativity taking its place at the heart of London 2012 was tre met Cedric Price’s novel ideas of architecture as “social means”. The Fun there for all to see in the bid. The intellectual architecture was won Palace was to be the very model of Price’s radical principles in architecture, in the values and vision for the Cultural Olympiad that emerged last embodying flexibility, indeterminacy, mobility and openness, and employing summer. Now we have systems, criteria and brand mark to offer the cheap lightweight industrial materials. “Since Littlewood’s ‘idea’ prescribed no hope of practical reality.6 particular programme or fixed activities, Price decided that it should have no specific plan and no fixed floor plan.”2 The Fun Palace was to include a retract- New leisure or New Labour? able corrugated roof, two gantry cranes on rails spanning the full 73.2 metres From the start of the Fun Palace project, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood had of the two central bays, service towers producing a grid of interlocking squares, explicitly framed their project as mending the false division between work and

150 151 the art of dissent excavations leisure: “[It was] essential to eliminate [the] unreal division between leisure and fight against the containerisation of goods which cost jobs. The dockers had work time.”7 been fighting this throughout the 1960s but it exploded as an issue in 1972.”11 Like many radicals (such as Alexander Trocchi, Constant Nieuwenhuys These efforts by dockers were not an attempt to express themselves freely in a and others), Price and Littlewood were influenced by the expectation of the world after work, but rather defensive campaigns to keep hold of what work “new windfall of leisure time” provided to the working classes by mechanisation they still had. By pure coincidence, the testing ground for the introduction and automation: of containerisation into the Port of London took place on Chobham Farm, a goods yard behind Stratford station, on what is now part of Those who at present work in factories, mines and offices will quite and Westfield East: “Three London dockers were threatened with prison for soon be able to live as only a few people now can: choosing their own picketing the Chobham Farm container base in June. Some 35,000 dockers congenial work, doing as little of it as they like, and filling their leisure struck unofficially throughout Britain in support of the pickets, and hundreds with whatever delights them. Those people who like fiddling with joined the picket of Chobham Farm the day the arrests were expected.”12 These machinery and pressing buttons can service and press buttons in the protests spiralled from a defensive campaign to protect jobs into one the largest robot-manned factories.8 actions by organised labour since the General Strike: around 250,000 workers struck unofficially, picketing Fleet Street and closing down several national Or, as Trocchi put it: “Thus freed from all economic responsibility, man will have newspapers until the arrested dockers were released.13 at his disposal a new plus-value, incalculable in monetary terms, a plus-value not In 1951 the Port of London was the second largest dock in the world. So, computable according to the accountancy of salaried work... play value.”9 while it is claimed that the docks and the extensive canal traffic that served It is interesting to read these utopian predictions of the end of work in the them were wound down because of the impossibility of getting larger ships up light of our now apparently wholly de-industrialised society, where work con- the Thames, containerisation has also played a pivotal role in the transforma- tinues by other means. What is activity after work? Perhaps more importantly, tion in the Port of London’s fortunes. It was no accident that London’s docks how is capitalism to extract value from workers, after they are “free” from work? had historically contained some of the most militant unions and labour organi- Price was concerned that this new leisure time be spent productively, in sations. “With the use of larger ships and containerisation, the importance of training for the new forms of work. He applied himself to the problem of the the upstream port declined rapidly from the mid-1960s. The enclosed docks “brain drain” Britain was perceived to suffer from. So, while government plan- further up river declined and closed progressively between the end of the 1960s ners were concerning themselves with reproducing workers with more free time and the early 1980s.”14 as “workers”, Price was devising new forms of training and education disguised The building around the London 2012 Olympics completes a triangulation as “leisure”. Leisure was to be, after all, much like work, co-ordinated activity. of by the City, the and a retail and transport The word “fun” was essentially a trope for new “productive and constructive hub in Stratford. This is not by any means yet a smooth space, one tuned to uses” of free time.10 and reflective of the abstract flows of money managed at these other sites, but it is a space very much in the process of being smoothed out. While on the one Flatscape with containers hand Docklands Light Railway and London Underground links converge on Although many of the pioneers of radical thought of the 1960s were celebrat- Stratford, bringing people to and from the Games and Westfield retail centre, ing the new struggles for free time and a qualitatively improved life, there were below, rail links bring containers to and from Tilbury, New Spitalfields Market important labour struggles taking place. Some of those struggles may not have and beyond. fitted the notion of what Price and his peers might have considered “progres- sive”. One area of conflict in particular directly related to the contested role The London Development Plan of new technology that so fascinated Price and Banham is related geographi- In the 1951 London Development Plan there is no mention of the advent of cally to the liminal zone which the Fun Palace was to occupy: “the dockers’ larger ships or the technical necessity of containerisation as an argument for

152 153 the art of dissent excavations the transformation of the docks. Rather, the displacement of industry from the , 1944, the 1951 London Development Plan and the Civic Trust’s river and canal side is argued for to confront the twin evils of blight and pol- plan for a Lea Valley regional park, 1964. We can trace in those early examples lution, and cure them through the virtues of parks, open space and picturesque of the management of space explicit arguments for de-industrialisation and the views. In 1951, 85.1% of the riverside below Blackfriars Bridge was used for formulation of “healthy leisure”, management of urban nature all pre-figuring industrial and commercial uses. In 2012 at least the same percentage is occu- the tenets of the approach by the London Development Authority (LDA) and pied by luxury apartments. As early as 1951, there is a glimpse of the potential the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) to planned domestication of the for the docks as a former site of messy work to be transformed into a scene of wilder aspects of city life in the present day. leisure and conspicuous consumption. But this development would not only Price and Littlewood’s plans, despite being unrealised, represent a signifi- affect the river, canals and former docklands. It is symptomatic of a broader cant response to the conditions and arguments steering the post-war recon- shift across the UK to a services-based economy and a built environment that struction of London. Moreover, we can see the “visionary” principles explored would both reflect and arguably engineer that shift. in the plans for the Fun Palace: the collapse of distinction between leisure and The County of London Plan, 1943, and the 1951 London Development work, the mechanisation of play, administered participation and user-generated Plan “opened the post-war attack on London’s four main defects – traffic content as the very virtues and values celebrated in the post-Fordist paradigm. congestion, depressed housing, intermingled housing and industry, and insuf- ficiency of open space”.15 Output of modified people The key strategies to achieve this “attack” were: In order to facilitate an environment that was to be “continuously adaptable, acknowledging change and indeterminacy in a continuously evolving pro- - decentralisation of industry; cess”,16 Littlewood and Price put together an interdisciplinary group of col- - decentralisation of population from the “congested centre”; laborators and consultants from engineering, design, theatre, cybernetics and - “a substantial increase in riverside open space”; technology. Although Price and Littlewood are interpreted as utopian vision- - slum clearance; aries working with the advanced technologies and ideas of their times, some - a substantial programme of building housing undertaken by local of the ideas of the Cybernetics Group for the Fun Palace seem in retrospect councils with support from the London County Council (nonetheless profoundly sinister. A good example is Gordon Pask’s sketch “Organisational resulting in a net displacement of the existing population); Plan as Programme”, indicating in a circuit-like diagram describing a feedback - planning for organised leisure space; loop between the “Input of Unmodified people” arriving in the building and - clearance of “use-rights”; the “Output of Modified People” interacting as they leave. - clearance of “non-conforming industry”; and Unfortunately, neither Littlewood nor Price can be saved from the impli- - “population management”. cations of their patrician positions, playful as they may have been. As Joan Littlewood put it in a letter to Gordon Pask, head of the Cybernetics Group: Rather than looking for the discontinuities between the (supposedly utopian) plans of the post-war Labour Government and the current plans for the We can to some extent control these transformations, though, in this Olympic Games and legacy, it might be a more interesting and contentious case, we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computa- project to look at the continuity between them. tion is done as a result of the interaction taking place between mem- A good example is the way in which Michael Heseltine’s proposals for bers of the population, either by verbal discourse, or by cooperation to a development to extend from that of the Docklands, bal- achieve a common objective. The paradigm for the control of such a ancing the west London intensification around Heathrow, was picked up by population is the maturation of a child, the subtle interplay of action Gordon Brown’s Labour Government. Similarly, we could go back to Patrick and the existing language to produce thought, and the development of Abercrombie’s redevelopment plans for post-war London – The Greater meaning to control action in society.17

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In an attitude typical of colonialism, the proletarian test subject is imagined as less than adult, suitable to experiment on and not necessarily in full posses- sion of their own volition. There is at least a sense in which this experiment conducted by bohemian researchers would genuinely provide for surprising feedback, unexpected stimulus or response. Its staged freedom is a world away from the secured environments visitors will be funnelled in and out of around the 2012 Games. What is crucial about the approach though is that Price, Littlewood and Pask sought not only to change and control an environment, but to employ an environment to induce a change in the subjects that moved through it. In this sense, Price’s architecture anticipated post-Fordism itself.18 Open architecture would act as project, soft policing and springboard for social transformation. As Price said of a later project, “Like the Fun Palace, the Potteries Thinkbelt was not an expressive or symbolic building, but an interac- tive device in which the subject could undergo a transformation.”19 So what was this new or ideal subject being produced and to what purpose? It fits the description Brian Holmes excavated from management literature and social commentary of the late 1990s:

I call this ideal type the flexible personality. The word “flexible” alludes directly to the current economic system, with its casual labor contracts, its just-in-time production, its informational products and its absolute dependence on virtual currency circulating in the financial sphere. But it also refers to an entire set of very positive images, spontaneity, crea- tivity, cooperativity, mobility, peer relations, appreciation of difference, Alessandra Chilá, Output of Modified People, 2008 openness to present experience… you can say that these are our crea- tions, but caught in the distorting mirror of a new hegemony.20 Other less tangible benefits the London 2012 Olympics is expected to bring to the area are improved health, education, social inclusion, ecology, housing This in turn corresponds to the new forms of subjectivity training and behav- and employment. iour modification at work in the futuristic projections of the 2012 Olympic site and the arguments by which it is framed by planners and politicians: Creative prison Of course to anyone who grew up near the area, the Lea Valley is familiar as The new Olympic Park under construction in the Lower Lea Valley a place where people make their own entertainment, from allotment holders, will revive one of the most deprived areas in the country. Thousands footballers, anglers, kite flyers, ramblers, cyclists and nature lovers to ravers and of jobs will be created. Transport links will be transformed. Thousands free party-makers, under-age drinkers, graffiti artists and scooter thieves. It is of homes for key workers will be built. Parts of the landscape that have no accident that all these activities require a minimum of services and equip- been wasteland will spring to life.21 ment and yet produce the altered states, collective bonds, social communication and physical exertion that are the very stuff of life. Organised without licence (usually) nor permission... without planning or costly amenity.

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This is the very opposite of what we see in the projections for the new It seems no coincidence several of the promotional images for the London Olympic site of the Games and in legacy mode. Instead, we have a harmonious Olympics Park are framed by the two key financial districts, Canary Wharf to managed nature, organised and safe exercise, communication technologies – the south and the City to the west. mobile phones, water, the Docklands and city – centres of international finan- cial flows. These images are also characterised by a multiculturalism peculiar to Playland neoliberal development – the dream image of difference without conflict and most importantly without work or workers – no one who has actually built or Playland is a country whose inhabitants are busy celebrating rituals, contributes to the running or servicing of this place appears in these visions. and manipulating objects and sacred words, whose sense and purpose Whereas Price’s model disposes of labour through automation, the LDA’s they have, however, forgotten.25 vision hides labour in dream like reflections, glass, water, smoke and mirrors. A recent example by one of Price’s most successful disciples, Will Alsop’s The kind of architectural space of pre-emptive unfreedom shored up against Creative Prison project, gives us a flavour of the direction in which Price’s ideas conflict common to Price and Littlewood’s Fun Palace, the London 2012 have travelled since their inception: Olympic Park and the Creative Prison can be related to the dense layers of financialised risk, described by Randy Martin, on which the production of such The layout of the prison mimics that of a college campus with separate spaces economically depends: living modules, or “blocks”, as Alsop calls them (though I prefer module since block is still such a carceral-centric term). While being typically If bringing the future into the present is the temporality of financial- brightly coloured like most of Alsop’s work, the inmates would “live in ized risk, pre-emption is its preferred mode of activation. Acting before clusters of between 12 and 15” and would “be able to control how long action has coalesced, intervening before the enemy has emerged, pun- they spent in their cells at the end of a day of work or training”.22 ishing before the crime is committed, measuring before the outcome is achieved, selling before the product is produced – all these join the Alsop has been extremely successful in so-called Creative Britain, build- hyperactive attention-deficit inducing disorder we have come to treat ing among other things Peckham library, flagship of regeneration, and a stem- so kindly and readily.26 cell research centre in Whitechapel. His architecture frequently deploys key ideas popularised by Cedric Price and contemporaries such as Archigram. The The collapse of distinction between leisure and work means that play mimics Creative Prison was the culmination of a consultancy project to address the work and all is work. The Olympic playland is a dystopia predicated on the poor conditions and chronic overcrowding of Britain’s prisons. This kind of blue dream of omni-surveillance and super-exploitation. A creative prison we find sky thinking should not surprise; as well as promoting creativity, New Labour being constructed all around us today. had also innovated in criminalisation. Over 3,000 new criminal offences were If the Fun Palace can be considered a pre-vision of the emerging post- created during the last decade under the Labour Government. industrial society, we can wager the London Olympics won’t be that society’s There are increasingly vocal critics of the “creative economy” celebrated in crowning success. Rather, these designs represent the return, as farce, of Price’s Britain and exported by its boosters elsewhere. It seems that under its shiny visionary dream – a plasticated world populated by unreal avatars repeating surface there are problems, namely that its booming appearance is simply the gestures rehearsed on TV. The very creation of this landscape will be under- knock-on effect of a financial sector which only drains wealth from the rest of pinned by debt, exploitation and public bankruptcy. What if we think like Price the world: “Britain’s financial sector is parasitic on healthy growth elsewhere, and take a visionary stance towards the future? We could reject the poverty of mostly in East Asia”.23 GLA’s Alan Freeman, one of the creative industries’ choosing between the shiny service work jobs and the policed leisure offered biggest boosters, has described the City’s advantages as “artificial conditions and instead imagine what might be built out of the ruins of the financialised sustained in the metropolis by the superexploitation of the rest of the world”.24 city after the new economy.

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